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The Project
The Spring project is a effort to create the best (open source) RTS game engine. We also like to allow all sorts of game content to be played with it. And make it easy for people to play the mods.
So.. if you like to play RTS games, make your own RTS game, program on a cool cross platform 3D engine or do other stuff like AI programming make concept art or sound effects or.. or.. other interesting stuff.. Join our community! :-)
The people in the Spring community can more or less be split in the following groups:
- Developers -The people that like to work on the engine.
- Modders - The people that like to make units. See also Mods
- Mappers - The people that like to make the worlds to play on.
- Players - The people that like to play the thing you get once you combine the above.
Current Status
There is currently no lead developer for the project as a whole.
- Jelmer Cnossen leads the Windows port.
- And Chris Han leads the Linux (Multiplatform) port.
Once the multiplatform version becomes the main development branch and both the Windows and Linux team merge we will evaluate how we can organise the project.
Roadmap
The current plan is to drop the Windows branch and continue working with the multiplatform version. After that we evaluate and reorganise the project to fit the new multiplatform development model. Once we have this fixed we will need to talk about stuff like vision and a new roadmap I guess.
History
The Spring engine is inspired by the game "Total Annihilation" (TA) by Cavedog Entertainment. TA, released in 1997 is the best RTS ("Real Time Strategy") game "of all time" according to Gamespy.
Stefan Johansson started the Spring project within the SY clan that had already made the XTA mod for the original TA engine. His goal was to make a engine that could replace the now ageing TA engine.
The original TA engine was very advanced but still had some hard limits. Cavedog went bankrupt some years after it released TA. Before it went under it had released TA:Kingdoms but despite it had a more advanced engine it did not get very popular. So the community kept using the original TA engine.
Atari the current owner of the TA franchise, showed little intention to make a sequel. And Chris Tailor the lead developer of the original TA game was hard at work with his new company "Gas Powered Games" to make the "Dungeon Siege" games.
After some years of private development within the SY Stefan and the others decided to release Spring under the GPL. I was not around but I do understand that this was difficult choice as Spring represented a lot of work.
With this the Spring Project managed to attract attention from people that would otherwise not be interested. David Anderson was one of them, he started the multi platform port of Spring. Which now after a difficult start will replace the existing Windows only branch. Stefan Johansson was hired by Massive Entertainment and therefore stopped active Spring engine development. Still he is around and keeps XTA up to date.
History Links
- "Latest info about TA 2 & TA sequels + a little history of TA :" entry in the tauniverse.com forum